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Microsoft Co-founder Dings Windows 8 As 'Puzzling, Confusing'
CWmike writes "Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has called Windows 8 'puzzling' and 'confusing initially,' but assured users that they would eventually learn to like the new OS. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, left the company in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. In a post to his personal blog on Tuesday, Allen said he has been running Windows 8 Release Preview — the public sneak peak Microsoft shipped May 31 — on both a traditional desktop as well as on a Samsung 700T tablet, designed for Windows 7. 'I did encounter some puzzling aspects of Windows 8,' Allen wrote, and said the dual, and dueling user interfaces (UIs), were confusing. 'The bimodal user experience can introduce confusion, especially when two versions of the same application — such as Internet Explorer — can be opened and run simultaneously,' Allen said."
Users will like it in the end. Just like people like Ribbon now, even if they were confused first.
Almost.
They'll hold your hard work hostage in the guise of proprietary application and data formats instead.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I see this mistake being made all the damn time and, well, it's STILL "sneak peek." A peak is e.g. the top of a mountain or a sudden, high jump in a graph whereas peek is about taking a quick look at something.
I find it pretty sad that even Allen is finding problems with it. I can't say I understand the necessity of making a workstation OS easy-to-use on a phone. They should have been focusing on making it work better on, you know, workstations. For example, I have 3960x1600 pixels of resolution on my current workstation, and windows is a complete dog in terms of window management. How exactly does Windows 8 address this? It doesn't, but gee, it works great on a cellphone/tablet, which maybe I'd care about if I actually ran Visual Studio on a fucking cell phone. As it stands, this UI is an inconsistent piece of garbage, whose sole purpose seems to be to force me to waste my time learning how to use their mobile UI, in the hopes that maybe I'll be more likely to buy one of their tablets.
Considering that there are standard data formats readable today that date back to the 1960s - they are so old that they have EBCDIC headers instead of ASCII - Microsoft really have no excuse for their hidden, shifting then obsolete data formats. When you can't even open a file with the newer version of the software it was written on that is a bit bit of a kick in the nuts of your previous customers.
For me it's quite simple Windows 8 interface doesn't make me more productive.
Unless you use a tablet; where its just fine. Or count the fact its genuinely snappier than Windows 7... both of which are positives for productivity.
Looking at my physical desktop, I don't have fancy clocks, tons of post-its, shinny gadgets... No, just a couple of books, some papers. I don't want distractions. I want to be focused on my work.
And when you launch 'desktop mode' its pretty much windows 7; but faster, and even fewer distractions. Sounds good to me.
Really, I've been running windows 8 on one box for a couple months now. My biggest complaints are that there isn't a button on the task bar for the start menu -- its 'hot corners' and the shutdown command is a bit klutzier to get to. The former is an easy tweak to fix if i care enough; disable hotcorners, add a 'button'. The latter even easier.
The new start menu is really no less efficient to use than the old one on a desktop. Its a bit more distracting that it goes full screen, but thats about it, and as a result I'm motivated to pin more apps so i use it pretty rarely.
I expect we'll see some refinements over the next little bit, but really, on a desktop I never use the metro tile stuff, so its just not relevant. I cleaned up my start menu so there are no pinned tiles for shit i don't care about, same as i've always removed irrelevant default crap from my start menu. Overall the win8 desktop experience is fine with minimal tweaks.
As a tablet/ultrabook OS its a big improvement over win7.
WinRT (ARM)-- I'm not impressed or interested in it whatsoever, and hope it gets axed.
>But at least Windows allows you to switch back to the old style interface..
Until you hit the Windows key, then Metro slaps your face like a turgid cock in a bad gay porn film.
--
BMO
I was going to write I actually have come to like it but my fingers borked at it and I realised it's not true. I've been using it for weeks now at work and have come to peace with the UI. I have learned how to work my way around its nuisances without circumventing it entirely (I made a concious effort to work within the Windows 8 framework rather than just avoid it altogether as I figured I need to at least know how to use it).
In short, I hate not having a start menu and I hate note being able to just start typing an application name to find it and run it (I know I can press windows+f in Win 8 but it's no where near as easy).
However, I will say this. Windows 8 and more importantly Server 8 is fucking brilliant -under the hood-. The ability to natively team NICs, ReFS, the *enormous* improvement that is SMB3, better clustering, better management of machines from one location, storage spaces, the improvements in Hyper-V etc leave me stunned - compared to Server 2008 it's like comparing Windows 2000 and Windows 98. The underlying tech is miles in front of the old architecture. It's just such a pity they put this bloody interface on at the same time and made it compulsory because a lot of people are going to skip on Win8 and never notice how damn good the underneath tech actually is, this time around.
Surely its no coincidence that after Ubuntu switched to Unity Microsoft is releasing a confusing UI that nobody wants and saying "you will like it, really you will"!
You may be unaware of this, but Powershell supports remote operation, and can be used to completley administer a machine (recent versions of Windows Server ship without the graphics subsystem, relying on Powershell for full administration). People do what you derisively suggest that somebody "try" all the time.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Wouldn't that suggest that the new Start screen is a failure then? The fact you have to pin more apps than normal sounds very much like a workaround for deficiencies which didn't exist in Windows 7. Heck, I have about half of my Superbar in Windows 7 full pinned apps already - the rest I launch from the "recently launched" area of the Start menu (and the remainder via search of course). Does the Windows 8 Start screen have a recently launched area at least?
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
No, this site is about what people with an anti-Microsoft bias tend to think. To be honest I don't know why I'm complaining; I might as well ask Fox News to write about something good Obama's done.
As for the rest of your post; I read it, but yet couldn't find any actual information. Yes, I think that about best describes it.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Like they did with Vista? Oh wait, nobody bought it so they had to go back to the drawing board and give the people what they wanted with Windows 7.
This is actually an advantage that proprietary has over FOSS, if you don't like Win 8? Don't buy it and if enough agree with you and don't buy it they'll have to go back to the drawing board or watch the company go down the shitter. Don't like Gnome Shell or Unity? Tough fucking shit, they don't owe you a damned thing and don't give a shit WHAT you think. its their personal playtoy and if you don't like it you can go piss off.
So if you hate Win 8 join us that aren't gonna buy it, or machines running it, we'll see Win 7 rushed out by the OEMs who'll just drop a Win 8 DVD nobody will use in the bottom of the box to give Ballmer some bullshit numbers and everything will go back to normal. Hopefully the board gets tired of Bill's little buddy and punts his ass like a 30 yard field return and the next guy actually listens to the customers, that's how it works. All you can do in FOSS is play the distro shuffle and hope the part you have a problem with isn't a core component everyone uses because again, they don't owe you a damned thing, its free, like it or lump it.
Personally I'll stick with the OS where I can skip 2 major releases (XP and Vista) and still be supported with updates until I decide they put out a product I liked with Win 7. You could go straight from 2K to 7 if you wanted and been under patch support the entire time, you just can't do that in FOSS land unless you have the money for a major support contract.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What rock have you been living under?
Upgrades and installations have been doable as a 100% unattended task for over a decade now, with Microsoft tools only! Not only can you do it remotely, it's possible to power on a machine over the network, have it upgrade itself, and shut itself back down without any human intervention whatsoever.
PXE boot, reliable network broadcasts, image-based installation, pre- and post- installation scripts, driver injection, update merging, various upgrade scenarios, backup and recovery of user data, etc... are all old hat. Most of those don't even require any additional licensed software such as SCCM, which just provides a GUI and a database for tracking progress.
Tada: Windows Deployment Services and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. Just because you aren't aware of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
On top of that, Group Policy shits all over the desktop fleet management systems available in Linux, because it's based on a hierarchical policy engine instead of flat text files, which have poor support for things like rollback.
For example, I bet every Linux admin here can tell me a dozen ways they can set arbitrary values in configuration files across 10,000 machines, but not one of them can give me a good solution for undoing various random subsets of those settings years later! For example, you may want a site-specific setting to revert to defaults when the computer is moved out of the site, without undoing other settings in the same file that are relevant to all sites.
Good luck implementing a general-case solution for that problem in Linux, because the text-file configuration paradigm just doesn't work that way! You'd have to convince the entire Linux community to switch to some other paradigm first, and that's just not going to happen.
Where is it written that Microsoft must force users of one device category to use the same interface as a completely different device category, no matter how flawed it is for that device?
They did this before with Windows XP Tablet Edition - a mouse driven stack on touchscreen / pen input devices. It was horrible. Now they've flipped the coin and we have a touchscreen / pen input driven stack on keyboard / mouse devices. It's horrible, and people don't want it.
Google and Apple have done this right - a different UI layer and API over a (mostly) common lower system. This way you can have a user experience that is tailored to the device you're using. Android does this. Chrome OS does this. iOS does this. Mac OS X does this.
Windows does not.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I'll go one better.
The company I work for is starting our mass rollout of Windows 7, upgrading from Windows XP. The team I work on has fully automated this process to the point where a site technical coordinator goes to a web page, clicks the assets he wants to migrate, selects "roles" for the machines (what application package sets they get for the user's responsibilities) and then clicks a button to execute. The XP machine then does the following:
1. Check to see if there's enough free disk space to complete the migration
2. Download a RAMdisk image of WinPE to boot from
3. Swap out the bootloader for the Windows 7 version, which allows booting from the RAMdisk image
4. Update the firmware on the device (BIOS / uEFI)
5. Reboot to the RAMdisk image
6. RAMdisk image detects if the device has an encrypted file system (laptop) and retrieves the unlock key from the encryption keystore server, and unlocks the filesystem
7. Create a virtual hard drive file from the network that contains everything this system needs to remotely reimage, minus applications.
8. Data is migrated out of user profiles to a temp folder
9. Old OS and applications are moved to a backup folder
10. New OS image of Win7 SP1 is dropped on the disk around the migration store and backup folder, from the VHD created before
11. Drivers specific to the device are injected into the new Win7 install, from the VHD created before
12. Reboot back to the hard disk
13. Drivers are found and installed
14. Applets and agents necessary for hardware (Laptop power management, Lenovo "craplets" necessary for hardware features, etc.) are installed, from the VHD created before
15. Antivirus is installed and updated
16. Encryption agent is reinstalled if it's a laptop (no mandate for desktops to be encrypted at this point)
17. Reboot
18. User data is migrated forward from the migration store temp folder
19. Applications are delivered by our software deployment infrastructure
20. User is presented with "Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to login".
21. When they log in, they find all their stuff is still there, and all their applications are freshly installed. Total time on hardware that isn't an antique? 40 minutes.
All kicked off from a web page. On an 11 year old Windows XP. Don't knock what you don't know, or haven't spent time to learn.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You have completely missed the point, since they are simply using proprietary formats when open ones are available solely to create vendor lock-in and squeeze competition out. Also, you are assuming that those format specs are 100% accurate and always adhered to my Microsoft. Over the course of a products life they change things as handled internally. Once lock-in is achieved they then document one particular state of the "evolution" of the format. You are acting as though they document everything up front, make it available to everyone prior to use, and then adhere to it religiously. The actual fact is that they implement it, change it on the fly, release outdated specs when it is too late for any competitor to use them to create a competing product, and just generally use it to leverage people into a deeper state of lock-in. Furthermore, they make sure their internal guys in the OS side have access to it (and other specifications vice versa) well before anyone else.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun